Of All The Stars

by Ally B

  “I’m on my way.”

  After quickly brushing my teeth and using the bathroom, I pull on a pair of leggings and a Williams Planetarium hoodie before sliding on my glasses and creased sneakers.

  It’s not until I’m looking in my rearview mirror backing out of my driveway when I realize I look like hell.

  The drive to the planetarium is quick. The roads are basically empty, as they should be. No one should ever be awake at 7:30 am on a Sunday.

  I park in my usual spot at the back of the planetarium lot, locking my car before trudging to the building and opening one of the glass double doors.

  “Kat?” I shout. I look into the ticket booth, but she’s not there either.

  I finally walk into the theater, not being able to hold back my yawn as I press a button on the board, waiting for the lights to turn on.

  When they do, the projector is clearly working perfectly fine.

  “Kat? If you woke me up this early when I’m not even supposed to be working, I’m going to kill you!”

  “Yeah, it’s not broken. I just had to get you here.” Kat’s voice echoes as the door behind me closes.

  “Didn’t this happen in a movie? With like an elevator and a doll and a bike?” I turn on the low lights, walking to the bottom part of the theater.

  “Please don’t freak out,” Max says quickly.

  Of course, I scream at the sound of his voice.

  Then after my heart is no longer jumping out of my chest, I shout, “What the hell, Max?”

  “I didn’t know how to talk without freaking you out,” he laughs, grabbing both of my arms. “You’re fine.”

  “Not funny.” I pull my arms away from him. “Why are you so awake?” He doesn’t answer, “Max, come on.” I scold him.

  “I never gave you your birthday present,” he says.

  “You know I don’t like getting stuff. I figured you finally listened to me.”

  “Since when do I listen to you?” He half-jokes, sitting down on the floor.

  I sit next to him, reluctantly. “Max, as much as I love the gesture, I sweep these floors. You don’t want to sit on them.”

  “You see that star?” He points to the ceiling.

  “Max, we’re in a planetarium. I see a lot of stars.” I sigh.

  “Cygnus,” he says.

  “Okay, got it.” I look to my favorite constellation.

  “Albireo A and B.” He instructs.

  “Got it.” I nod.

  “The blue one.”

  “B.” I correct him.

  “I bought it.”

  “You can’t actually buy a star, Max.” I sigh.

  “No, but I can buy an overpriced piece of paper that says you own one.” He holds out a picture frame with a slightly yellowed certificate in it.

  I take it out of his hands, scanning the paper. “This said you bought it three years ago.”

  “The day you got your job here,” he tells me, looking up at the stars. “I sat here for your entire shift listening to you talk about stuff you’d been telling me about for years.” A smile moves to his lips as he reminisces. “But in that speech you do at the beginning, one of the first things you say is how it’s dumb to buy a star and name it after your girlfriend or something.”

  “Individual names of the stars from the Greeks. Not like when you ‘buy a star’ and name it after your girlfriend—”

  “Yeah, that.” He cuts me off. “So, I’ve had this under my bed for a few years afraid to give it to you,” he says, rolling his eyes at himself. “Don’t know how you haven’t noticed the certificate for B hanging on my wall.”

  “Huh?”

  “I bought A the year after that. You own B. I own A,” he says. “I know it’s stupid, but—”

  “It’s not stupid at all, Max,” I reassure him. “It’s Jerry’s speech. I just memorized it.”

  “Really?” He asks.

  “It’s really nice, Max.”

  “So we’ll always be together, as dumb as that sounds. You’re B, and I’m A.”

  “I thought you liked B more?” I ask him, remembering an old debate we had about which star was better. His argument was pro-B because it’s his favorite color.

  “A sacrifice I was willing to make.”

  “You really thought about it being like us being together?” I ask him.

  “Yeah.” He looks into his lap, shaking his head slightly.

  “You know they’re 385 light-years apart, right?”

  “Yeah.” He shakes his head. “I know it’s dumb, I just thought—”

  “It’s not dumb, Max.”

  “Well, I’m glad you don’t think it’s dumb, because I’m about to do something really fucking stupid, and I’d really like you to remember that being 385 light-years apart doesn’t make us any less connected.” He shakes his head, staring at his phone screen as it lights up. “Phoebe Mitchell. You’ve been my best friend since we were eight-years-old and you moved into the house next door with your big shiny telescope and stars in your eyes. When we were twelve, my mom got the phone call about the accident, and everything changed for me in a much different way than it did for you. It was that day that I knew that I loved you.” He pauses.

  “Max, put your phone down,” I say softly, feeling my heart flip in my chest.

  He doesn’t. He keeps reading.

  “I knew on that day that I couldn’t live without you by my side.” He continues. “And I kept you there for a long time. When Graham moved here, I knew that I was losing you. Not in the way I lost you when you dated Jackson in eighth grade. In a real way. You liked him in a way you’ve never liked anyone. I understand that this may backfire, which is why I’ve kept it as hidden as I could for all these years, but I have to get this off of my chest. I know it could change our friendship, but I don’t care because I’m tired of pretending I’ll ever be able to be with anyone else without comparing them to you. I watched you dancing with him last night, and I couldn’t even hide the fact that it drove me insane from the girl I was dancing with. It’s not fair to her for me to pretend to want to date her, because you seemed to want me to. And the other night, when you saw us kissing, I knew your reaction was because deep down, you feel the same way I do. I’m no fan of Graham, but it’s not fair to him either. We have something that we will never find in anyone else. Ever. And I’ll be damned if I watch you, the most beautiful star in the universe, dance with any more Grahams at high school dances when you should be dancing with me.”

  I swear I feel my heart swelling, as its beat intensifies, mixed with a slight intoxication renders me unable to speak, let alone breathe.

  “I love you, Phoebe Mitchell. I mean, I really love you. And a million other people can tell you they love you, but they’re never going to mean it the same way I do.”

  It's when he puts his phone down and looks up at me, that I’m finally able to release my breath. The breath I didn’t even realize I’d held. I take in a much needed and very shaky one, before finally being able to speak the truth I’ve been fighting for weeks now, “I love you, too.”

  He closes his eyes and exhales, a smile breaking out on his incredibly handsome face.

  He opens his eyes and takes my face in his hands.

  My heart beats even faster as he moves closer and closer, whispering, “Can I kiss you?”

  “Yes.”

  Max’s lips, my Max’s soft, full, pillow-like lips, melt into mine.

  He doesn’t smell like coffee, he doesn’t hurry as he kisses me, and he doesn’t grip my waist in some sort of raw need.

  But the opposite.

  His mouth tastes like crisp bottled water, his exploration unhurried, and his hands gently on my face. His kiss is like laughter, a cold popsicle on a hot day, the sun against your skin on a cool one. His kiss is like being pushed higher and higher on a swing set when you feel your stomach flip in the most amazing way, and believing you’re flying, hoping your feet will never touch the ground again. His kiss is a summer night,
sitting on the porch looking up at the stars while the cicadas chirp under a full moon when suddenly, you see a million shooting stars. His kiss is everything a kiss should be, and so much more than you ever dreamed of.

  When he pulls away from the kiss, holding my face in both of his hands, I immediately wonder when he’ll do it all again.

  Looking in his eyes, there is no doubt he felt the same way I did.

  Do.

  Biting my lip, I look down and see the frame, holding the certificate that I’d joked about several times a day for as long as I’ve worked here, and suddenly, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

  I look back up at him, fully aware that I probably look like an idiot smiling from ear to ear, “You really gave me B?”

  He lets out a light laugh, his nose touching mine. “Out of all of the stars in the sky, you’re my favorite.”

  Thank you

  First and foremost, I want to thank you, the reader. You taking the time to dive into my little world of Emerson, means more than I could ever express.

  I’d like to thank my mom for constantly dealing with my ramblings and answering my questions, and the rest of my family for supporting me no matter how weird my dreams may be.

  A thank you to my cover designer, Jules from Jersey Girl Design, for accomplishing the near impossible feat of pleasing the worlds biggest perfectionist.

  And to Autumn from Wordsmith Publicity, for walking me through a million different things I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

  Thank you to Donna Cooksley Sanderson for editing this book so quickly and giving me invaluable advice I’ll hold onto for the rest of my career as a writer.

  About the Author

  What else was a book-loving teenage girl supposed to do while the nation was on lockdown, with no eight-hour school days, homework, clubs, or junior prom?

  To face the complete and utter uncertainty that is the year 2020, 16-year-old Ally B embarked on a journey in a world she could control. Between SAT prep, hours of schoolwork, and obsessively scouring the internet for international dishes to spend hours perfecting in her mother’s kitchen, ‘a world’ slowly began to form.

  She wrote obsessively for a month, nearly finishing the novel before realizing it wasn’t the story she wanted to tell. Only three characters and a street name made it through the journey of one document to the next, but the story she was telling was still one she wished she’d read long ago.

  Ally B resides in a small village near ‘Emerson’ with her mother and her dog, Theo. She’s very excited for the world to get back to normal so she can finally stop thinking about perfecting French recipes all of the time and making a mess of the kitchen—but until then—she suggests, wear a mask.

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